As the mother of the Obama government’s Plan B (aka “Morning After Pill”) demographic, I have strong feelings about the move to let 15 year olds just go to the store and buy the stuff. The Watcher’s Council has a forum up on that subject and, as always, Council members say the most interesting things — and that’s true whether or not I agree with their conclusions. You can read it all here, but I’m going to reprint my contribution below:

As the parent of minors, I think it’s appalling. The Left will always justify this kind of rule-making or legislation by pointing to those teenage girls who have dreadful home lives, and are at risk of being physically hurt if they confess to a pregnancy. Yes, those are real situations, but I’ve never seen any evidence that they are anything but a small minority. In the real world, parents whose daughters come home pregnant are not going to be happy, and they may yell at their daughter, but they don’t abuse her. They rally around her. In other words, they are family and they are there for her. (In this regard, I think the movie Juno was pretty accurate.)

The facts on the ground mean that the state’s motive in making birth control and abortifacients available to ever younger girls isn’t because it’s trying to protect a small minority of at-risk girls. Rather, it’s trying to break down the family unit. Sex is a great way to force that schism because, next to hunger, sex is the most powerful motivator. By promising children sex, and lots of it — without any messy consequences such as disease or pregnancy — the state ensures that children look to the state as the bountiful provider. The message is a simple one: We’ll make you happy; your parents will make you sad.

Of course, no one is looking at the very real consequences of the state’s handing out sex like an addictive drug. The state pours toxic hormone soups in adolescent bodies; treats those young bodies with powerful antibiotics; alienates young minds and emotions from those who are most likely to love them; and sends the message that human sex, rather than creating powerful, life-long emotional bonds, has no more meaning than (and about as much charm as) bovine, canine, or feline sex. No wonder the girls who graduate from the hook-up culture in college don’t feel liberated but, instead, just feel used and emotionally frozen. They have been used — not just by the men who get the girls, but by an all-powerful state that has as its goal the end of individuals’ control over their own bodies.

Lastly, there’s also something profoundly wrong about a government that, even as it criminalizes adult men and women who have sex with children, does everything it can to encourage children to have sex. I don’t have a good word to describe that. Revolting? Hypocritical? Sleazy? Obscene? Immoral? I think all apply.

(I was halfway through writing this one before I remembered that it was for Mr. Conservative and not for my own site. Now that it’s up there, though, I can reprint it here, and make my friends a part of the conversation.)

You know what your 12-year-old daughter needs? Free condoms. Even better, she needs to have those free condoms delivered directly to her in discrete packing, along with lubricants and other items to facilitate her burgeoning sex life. And you know what would make this free delivery service best of all? If it by-passed parents entirely.

If you’re writhing in agony reading those words, be grateful if you’re not living in California. The California Family Health Council (CFHC) has a Condom Access Project (CAP) that mails condoms to children 12 and over for free. Put another way, California taxpayers are funding a program that purchases, packages, and ships condoms to underage minors. Think about that for a moment: If an adult has sex with underage minors, it’s statutory rape and the adult is imprisoned and reviled. If a state facilitates sex for underage minors, it’s Progressive and admired. Go figure.

An obviously excited CAP recently issued a press release boasting that its program is expanding to teens in Fresno and San Diego counties. All that the kids need to do is go to a snappily designed website called “teensource.org,” fill out a form, and they’re in business.

Showing the cognitive difficulties that afflict career Leftists, that buzzy little CFHC press release is a classic case of the “Butterfield effect.” For those of you unfamiliar with this term, Fox Butterfield, a well-known Progressive journalist, gained notoriety for writing several articles in which he discussed what he thought was an inexplicable paradox: even as prison populations rose because of tougher sentencing rules, crime rates fell. He couldn’t even imagine the possibility that the tougher sentencing rules caused the falling crime rates.

In its press release, the CFHC proudly notes that it’s expanding its condom program, even as it says that “STD rates among California’s youth ages 15-19 are increasing.” Hmm. Could that rate increase be because the State of California is actively encouraging teens to have sex? (Not to leave the feds out of this equation, they used $423,500 in stimulus dollars to study “correct condom use.”) And could it be because teens, once allowed to do risky, are notorious for being irresponsible even if you give them all the necessary tools for playing it safe? This is why young teens don’t get driver’s licenses and older teens have expensive insurance: no matter the rules and the safety devices, teens are careless.

The announcement about the free condom program arrives at the same time that the FDA ruled that girls as young as 15 can buy the “morning-after pill” without parental consent. The morning-after pill is a powerful hormone cocktail that causes the uterus to reject a newly implanted zygote. In most states, teen girls cannot get their ears pierced, shoot paintball guns, or get a fake tan without parental permission, but they can put toxic quantities of hormones into their growing bodies, all without their parents knowing what’s going on.

Leftist governments hate families. The family unit is the strongest statement of individualism. The way to destroy the family is to use that most powerful of all human motivators – sex – to seduce the child away from the family and into the arms of the beneficent state. The state, which doesn’t love you, still gives you what you need for sex (condoms, The Pill, lubricants, instruction books). Then, because you’re a teen, when all those fail the state gives you the toxic medicines (hormones, antibiotics) and risky medical procedures to save you from your mistakes.

Conservative parents understand the message: “Mom and Dad are so yesterday. Turn to the state, which will give you everything you need.” Are those truly loving parents who happen to be Progressives ever going to wise up?

I had an interesting conversation with my mother, who may be 90, but is still sharper than most people you’ll meet. We got to talking about the Gosnell abortion/murder trial, which came as something of a surprise to her. Despite the fact that she watches the news and reads the newspaper, she hadn’t heard a thing about it. That wasn’t a surprise to me.

From there, the conversation wandered to the moral merits of abortion. My Mom came of age in a time and place when abortion was neither approved of nor frowned upon. It just existed. In the turmoil after the war, when people were starving in cities decimated by fighting, having a baby seemed like an impossibility — and it could be a death sentence for both mother and child. Nobody approved of abortion in war-torn streets, but they didn’t stop it either.

For that reason, it’s always been hard for my mother to understand the fervor Americans feel about abortion. To her, it just . . . is. (That’s probably the case for a lot of people who aren’t committed to one side or another of the abortion debate, which is why the media couldn’t risk the Gosnell trial coming into the open, in case it swayed indecisive people into the pro-Life column.)

While Mom couldn’t quite get the morality of abortion, I was able to get her to understand that the modern American state uses abortion to separate children from their families. We’ve talked before here about the fact that, in California, youngsters under 16 or 18 can’t play paintball, get their ears pierced, or get a fake tan without a parents’ permission. They can, however, get birth control, get abortions, and get treated for sexually transmitted diseases, all without a parents’ knowledge. Putting aside the invitation to the worst kinds of child sex abuse, what’s happening here is that the state promises children the keys to the kingdom of pleasure.

Food and shelter are necessities. Good food and good shelter are pleasures. But sex . . . there’s the ultimate endorphin rush. Mom and Dad, being mean, spiteful people, won’t let you have it, and they’ll give you Hell if there are consequences because you ignored their strictures. The state, though, it puts no obstacles in your path. Indeed, it helps you along with condoms, birth control pills, patches, and morning after pills. If you get pregnant, you get the Morning After pill or an abortion, and if you get an STD, it gives you antibiotics — all without the knowledge or consent of the people who, in 90% of all cases care about you most in the world.

The Left claims that this legislated immorality is to protect young girls from abusive parents who will leave them homeless or beat them if they come home pregnant. (Again, let’s ignore the fact that everything the Left does actually encourages the sexual abuse of children.) Using an argument that focuses on an extreme minority, the Left has put us in a position that sees all girls and boys in America get to have free sex courtesy of the State. The state has driven a wedge into the family unit, using the most potent endorphin driver available to motivate and reorient young people.

When I put it that way (as opposed to debating abortion’s morality), my mother suddenly sat up very straight, looked me straight in the eye, and said “But that’s socialism!” I practically jumped up and down applauding that she had realized what was going on. It turned out there was a reason for her insight.

I’ve mentioned before that my Dad came from a Communist milieu and, while he eventually voted for Reagan, his sister remained a devoted Communist until the day she died. Although she escaped Nazi Germany and eventually ended up in Palestine (and, after the War of Independence, in Israel), she decided that this young socialist state wasn’t properly committed to true Marxist socialism. She therefore returned to East Germany, where she lived out the remainder of her life.

She was still living in Israel, though, when my Mom and Dad got married. One day, when my Communist aunt was present, the subject of children came up. Mom said that she wanted to wait until she had a nice home of her own and some security before she had children, so that she could have the joy and comfort of really raising her own family. My aunt was shocked. “No. That’s wrong. The children belong to the State. You do not have the right to withhold them from the state, which should raise them.”

With this conversation living in her memory, my mother immediately understood the ramifications of a government severing the ties between parents and children. In some places, such as Mao’s China, it uses coercion. In America, it uses sex. No matter the method, the goal is socialist.

Keeping in mind the above, it’s understandable why people who fear socialism (as I do) greeted with howls of outrage the MSNBC contributor who said quite clearly, “All your children are belong to us.” Melissa Harris-Perry framed it cutely as it takes a village to raise a child, but that soft overlay covers pure, brute-force socialism. Villages are voluntary communities that share values. Homes are the ultimate refuge of the individual. Socialism holds that individuals have no value, except to the extent that they provide bodies to power the socialist state:

When I was growing up, there were quite a few slogans young people were urged to remember: “Question authority.” “Never trust anyone over thirty.” “Power to the People!” “Tell it like it is.” “Do your own thing.” Especially after Watergate, we were a generation that was warned never to trust the politicians. We were supposed to question everything.

In retrospect, of course, we were being manipulated. We weren’t really supported to question all of the authorities in our lives, nor were we supposed to disbelieve every politician. Instead, we were being steered into questioning and challenging a traditional status quo based upon the constitution and Judeo-Christian values. Nevertheless, the notion of questioning authority was very real. We didn’t assume our teachers were right. We were sheeple (all young people are), but we were sheeple that still tried to run in the opposite direction of the existing political class and its agenda.

Today’s generation of young sheeple has no desire to create a break-out herd that challenges the political status quo. Modern young sheeple do not question their teachers or their politicians. Instead, they accept hook, line, and sinker every fact — and it’s always Leftist facts — thrown at them.

The best example I’ve seen of sheepleness — the current generation’s complete and mindless acquiescence to the anticapitalist, environmentally insane, politically correct, anti-white racist stuff constantly being thrown at them — is a truly clever, marvelously done video by Jon Cozart, a sophomore at the University of Texas, Austin.

Jon is a talented lyricist and a wonderful singer, with a great range from almost bass all the way up to tenor. He’s become something of a YouTube star, and it’s quite obvious why.

Jon’s latest effort is “After Ever After — DISNEY Parody,” which uses familiar melodies to imagine what happened to the Disney characters after the movie ended. It’s good, really good. Clever lyrics, wonderful performance. The only problem with it is that it’s a perfect encapsulation of sheeple subservience to PC, Leftist crap. (Pardon my language.)

In my youth, which wasn’t that long ago, the rhetoric of our time (“question authority,” “never trust anyone over thirty”) would have had us challenging all the stuff that was spewing from Washington, D.C., and inundating us from the front of the classroom. We would have sneered with youthful cynicism at the Climate Change stuff, the anti-American stuff, the non-gays are evil stuff, etc.

This generation, however, cannot hop on the establishment bandwagon quickly enough. Today’s young people have no curiosity.

If you’ve ever read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time Trilogy, you must surely remember, in the first book, the way Meg, Calvin, and Charles are transported to the planet Camazotz, which is completely controlled by the evil IT. What makes IT so evil is that IT demands complete conformity. IT punishes anyone who dares to try to be an individualist. In doing so, it stifles everything that is good and loving. We have turned our young people into children straight from the school of Camazotz. They swear a lot, drink, and do drugs, but they are incapable of independent behavior, thought, reason, logic, or analysis.

The news is filled with stories lately about the way in which Progressive-managed public schools are behaving insanely when it comes to kids and faux-guns. My friend Mike McDaniel, whose regular home is Stately McDaniel Manor, has an article up at PJ Media today which combines surreal (yet sadly real) stories about teeny-tiny kids caught in their school’s anti-gun cross hairs. To the extent the world is going to hell in a hand basket, I can only say that the Progressives are making the trip there a whole lot faster and uglier.

Having babies used to be biologically inevitable. If you were a woman who had sex, the possibility of pregnancy increased automatically with every act of sexual intercourse. People have always had birth control (withdrawal, the rhythm method, vinegar-soaked sponges, primitive condoms, etc.) but their success rate was random and limited.

Then came modern birth control — pills, diaphragms, IUDs, quality condoms, etc. — and, for responsible women, sex stopped leading to pregnancy unless they wanted it to happen.

The societal assumption when birth control use surged in America was that women who used birth control would invariably have children. They’d simply do so on their own time-table, rather than on Nature’s. Some women waited too long (or just had problems with conception), but science had an answer there too, with increasingly successful fertility treatments, implants, and even complex surrogacies, using a combination of egg, sperm, and womb.

What no one predicted was that, given the choice, women simply wouldn’t want to have children. This isn’t just because they’re Malthusian environmentalists who are afraid that children will destroy the world. It’s because they don’t see children as part of their happy (and sometimes selfish) life plan:

For many individual women considering their own lives and careers, children have become a choice, rather than an inevitable milestone—and one that comes with more costs than benefits.

“I don’t know if that’s selfish,” says Jordan, the daughter of an Ecuadoran and an Ohioan who grew up in the South Bronx, explaining her reasons for a decision increasingly common among women across the developed world, where more than half of the world’s population is now reproducing at below the replacement rate. “I feel like my life is not stable enough, and I don’t think I necessarily want it to be … Kids, they change your entire life. That’s the name of the game. And that’s not something I’m interested in doing.”

I totally get that. As I hit my 30s, I was living the lush life: good job, good income, nice apartment, quality boyfriend and, when the long work hours were over, a lot of “me” time. I had no biological clock ticking away. I didn’t want children. In general, I’m not that fond of them. Yet here I am today, completely defined by my status as “Mom.” What the heck happened?

What happened was that my boyfriend (now husband) wanted children and I wanted him. The other thing that happened was that I took a long, considering look at all of the older childless couples I knew, who voluntarily stayed childless, and I didn’t like what I saw. Without exception, these people were more affluent than their peers, they were well-traveled, well-dined, and well-groomed. They were also rigid, humorless, thin-skinned, and unable to deal with even the most minor crises. I realized that it’s not just that (g00d) parents are good for children, it’s that children are good for parents.

I hated the baby and toddler years, and they definitely accelerated my aging (chronic sleep deprivation did not agree with me). I also hated the schlepping, the endless frustration of dealing with toddlers, and the chaos in my once-quiet house. I don’t like irrational creatures and there is no creature more irrational (from an adult perspective) than a toddler. Toddlers, of course, function in a completely rational world, defined by their immediate desires, limited understanding, and somewhat magical thinking.

It got easier as the kids grew up, and now I’m in a really great position where I’m optimizing the benefits that come with being a parent. I enjoy my teenagers, a great deal. They’re intelligent, loving, funny people and, while I like it when I’ve got my house it myself, I certainly don’t dislike it when they’re around. I like their friends too, and am very happy to have (no kidding) the most popular house in the neighborhood. My son, bless his heart, told me that all his friends like to be here because I’m the easiest-to-get-along-with parent they know. I’m not a pushover — it’s just that, as with politics, I’m laissez faire. I have a few fixed rules but otherwise, if the kids are not hurting themselves, each other, my dog, or my house, I leave them alone.

Meanwhile, they keep me young. I hope I’m not mutton dressed as lamb, but I know the games, music, movies, language, clothing (which I don’t copy), and the general culture of youth. I am not calcified and I am not rigid. I don’t get hysterical if there’s no blood or vomit involved in whatever crisis arises — and I don’t even get hysterical about blood or vomit. I just move a bit more quickly to cope with it.

My point is that the selfish person should want to have children. I believe that my children benefit from my selfishness, which leads me to a benign neglect that keeps them from trying to grow under the shadow and endless wind of a helicopter parent, and I get to stay young, agreeable and adaptable. It’s a good deal for me, even though the upfront costs (two miserable pregnancies followed by years without sleep, rest, or privacy) were high.

Since I like to keep up with current music, when I’m in the car I often listen to Sirius XM Hits 1 (channel 2), which tracks the Top 40 songs. Weekday mornings, Hits 1 offers the Morning MashUp, which consists of two guys and a gal chatting together about celebrity gossip and taking listener phone calls.

Today, much to my surprise, I tuned in to hear this trio talking about the case of the seven year old boy who was suspended from school for lobbing an imaginary grenade at an imaginary box of imaginary bad guys. Even more to my surprise, the Morning MashUp gang was infuriated by the suspension. Their attitude was that kids have to be kids, that children should be allowed to exercise their imaginations, that children have always played cops and robbers, and that the school massively overreacted.

I agree completely with the Morning MashUp gang. I also wonder if (or, perhaps, hope that) they are the tip of the iceberg, with the iceberg being a backlash against the stifling conformity and inanity of the various liberal ukases that control more and more of our lives and of our children’s lives.

As an aside, I’m also willing to bet that there is, or easily could be, a study showing that destroying imaginary bad guys, whether by lobbing pretend grenades or having a wild game of cops and robbers, isn’t a psychologically necessary way for children to deal with fear. Children are certainly fearful. They have very little control over their lives and their world is peopled with danger, both real and (because they are children) imaginary. Being able to throw a grenade at the bad guys sounds like a perfectly therapeutic imaging exercise designed to empower a fearful child.

I know I’m just grumpy, but this promotional mailing from Ithaca College rubbed me the wrong way:

Ready to write environmental wrongs. Ithaca College will turn your academic passions into unforgettable experiences — and make you ready for the adventure of your life.

I know that the first sentence is meant to be a clever pun, but it’s not. At first glance, I thought it was a typo or blatant grammatical error. On second reading, I thought Ithaca was promising to teach students how to plan to create environmental wrongs. On third reading, I realized that Ithaca is offering to teach students how to “list” environmental wrongs, although I suspect there’ll be a fair dollop of creative writing (i.e., anthropogenic climate change) thrown in.

The whole thing — with the smug girl and the promise that documenting, or making up, environmental wrong is the “adventure of your life” — made me queasy.

Am I overreacting? I probably am. But as Kurt Schlichter said about Lena Dunham’s and HBO’s vile, nihilistic show Girls, we need to know what’s out there, because it is out there, and it’s aimed at our children.

Conservatives often talk about the fact that Progressives use children as a wedge issue for everything. Changes in immigration law? It’s to protect those poor children whose parents illegally dragged them across the border. Changes in health care law? It’s so that children, right up until the childlike age of 26, can get full health care, regardless of their parents’ economic or lifestyle decisions. Gun control? It’s for the children, never mind that statistics indicate that children die in greater numbers when gun control increases even as cultural brakes decline.

Barack Obama, of course, took the “it’s for the children” approach to public policy to sickening new heights when he surrounded himself by a gaggle of youthful darlings to herald his stale and ineffectual “gun control” orders. He then followed this unsavory photo op with heart-rending videos of children pleading for an end to guns in America. Yes, children are our future, and yes, we want to leave them a viable world when we pass on, but Drudge was right when he noted that only demagogues surround themselves with children to justify increased tyranny.

I’ve established (to my satisfaction, at least), that Progressives misuse children in order to co-opt their parents. But how do Progressives co-opt the children? Easy: “It’s for the animals.”

In the old days, animal stories and movies used to be about a kid’s relationship with his animal, whether the animal was a yearling, a yellow dog, or a black horse. The child learned and grew because of his responsibilities for the animals and, often, because of the hard, human choices he had to make regarding the animals. Animals weren’t better than humans, but they existed artistically to help children learn about love, responsibility, and tough decisions.

Starting with the baby seal campaign in the 1970s, though, the Left realized that it can bring kids on board by making them feel that ordinary human activity is devastating for animals. The starting point, and it really wasn’t a bad one, was to focus on the animals that were being driven, quite unnecessarily, to extinction, such as the baby seals beaten for fashion fur, the dolphins killed by careless tuna fishing methodologies, or the various African and Asian animals being minced and powdered for aphrodisiacs (and no, I do not want to hear that there’s nothing frivolous about the man who needs an aphrodisiac). There really wasn’t a credible reason for these animals to be subject to mass slaughter.

Lately, though, the Left has been using animal education with children, not because the animals are a target of foolish, wasteful behavior, but because their deaths are a byproduct of necessary human behaviors that the Left hates. Thus, we saw the whole spectacle of polar bears who were supposedly being driven to extinction because Mommy drives a minivan, or spotted owls being driven from their habitat because nasty humans insist on living in houses. It’s one thing to heed the Biblical injunction that we are stewards of the earth, something with which I heartily agree. It’s another thing altogether to teach children that, if at all possible, we should vanish from the earth entirely. (Something that’s looking surprisingly likely, given world-wide demographic trends.)

The reality of life is that anything that living creatures do on this earth affects other living creatures. This is true for plants (kudzu, for example), animals (the balance of wolves and deer in Yellowstone, for example), and humans. Because humans have the greatest geographic range and the most inventive minds, we have more scope to affect our surroundings than do plants or animals. Moreover, even when we seem to be changing for the better, we still manage to mess with nature. When we had horses and carriages, the world was awash in filthy, germ-carrying urine and feces. When we got cars, the urine and feces vanished from cities and towns, but we got dirtier air. When we eat meat, we use resources to feed the animals, the animals produce waste, and we have to kill the animals to take advantage of their protein. That all sounds yucky, right? Except it turns out that when we seek protein alternatives (and even Progressives won’t deny that we need protein), we starve indigenous people who are dependent on these alternatives, rather than eating them just because it makes them feel very politically correct. In the same vein, our decision to use corn for fuel, because it’s “cleaner” than fossil fuels, led to starvation and revolution in the Middle East.

Humans, like any animals, have to fight for resources — we fight with each other, and we fight with animals. Because we’re human, we have the gifts of a greater, more flexible intellect and of a moral compass, so we are obligated to mitigate the negative effects our actions have on others. Mitigating those effects, however, is not the same as vanishing altogether — which is pretty much what the Leftists are suggesting to our children is the best solution of them all.

One of the things I find most distasteful about ObamaCare is its requirement that employers must provide insurance coverage for their employees’ children through their 26th year. I don’t find this just economically wrong, I find it cosmically, morally wrong that our federal government has officially extended childhood until citizens are 26. I cannot think of a single reason why our national policy should be to delay normal human mental and emotional maturation. Progressives seem to have added to the Constitution, right after “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a coda saying that being Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, is a legitimate career goal.

I mentioned yesterday that, over the Thanksgiving weekend, I listened (and am listening to) both Joseph Ellis’s American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic and David McCulloch’s 1776. One of the things that comes through so clearly in these books is that the Founding Fathers were adults, not children, and they were adults because, from a very young age, all of them had taken on adult responsibilities, whether as soldiers, surveyors, blacksmiths, booksellers, lawyers, farmers, printers, or whatever other careers the Founders pursued. Even gentlemen farmers such as Jefferson still had myriad responsibilities for their estates and the people dependent on those estates.

That all of them took on responsibility so early was not unusual; it was the norm. What would have struck all of them as peculiar was a world view holding that, during your peak years of childbearing, physical strength, and mental adaptability, you should lounge around the house pursuing your bliss and living off of your parents. Necessity required the Founders to work and grow. A combination of affluence and socialism ensures that our children can remain adolescent well into their late 20s.

Nowadays, the majority of American children stay in school until age 18. In Colonial times, but for a few college-bound gentlemen, by 18 most would have been employed for years. The women would already have had children and that would have been true whether they were ladies of leisure, or working women responsible for a family farm, a washing business, housework, etc.

For too many Americans, though, adulthood doesn’t even begin at 18. The middle and upper classes send their children to college. For $20,000 to $50,000 per year (payable by their parents or the government, either through direct grants or guaranteed loans), they attend a few classes, take some tests, meet new people, party a lot, travel (always at someone else’s expense) and generally delay taking on any real responsibility. Many of them study subjects that will have no measurable benefit on their lives, either in terms of future income or acquired knowledge. Only once these youngsters graduate, at 21 or 22, do some of them finally start working for real. Some of them get married and have children. Too many, however, continue to be adolescents: they get low-level jobs (although it’s not always their fault in the Obama economy) and they still look to Mom and Dad for financial support and insurance. Partying remains important.

The degree jockeys further extend their adolescence with further education. Some actually study things that will prove remunerative (law, medicine, architecture, business, etc.), but many opt for purely academic disciplines, getting advanced degrees in History, Medieval French, Puppetry, Womyn’s Studies, etc. They do so despite knowing that there is almost no chance that they’ll get a job in their field. I would never make such a foolish decision with my time and money. When I finished my undergraduate education, despite my abiding love for history, I knew I would never get a job in my field. The grad students in the history department told me that, in my graduation year, there were only four PhD level job openings for history majors in the entire United States. I went to law school instead.

People need to grow up. They are just as stunted without mental maturation as they would be if a disease or dietary deficiency kept their bodies from growing properly. I realized the truth of this when I had children. Although I’d worked as a lawyer for many years, and had my own business, until I had children and truly had others entirely dependent upon me, I was still a kid. Nothing I did really mattered. When you have children, everything matters. Your choices are suddenly monumental, since they affect not only you but a helpless human being, who needs you desperately and looks up to you with love and respect. I definitely miss the irresponsibility of my youth, but I wouldn’t go back. I was biologically destined to mature, and it feels right.

What triggered this post about the terrible effect of ObamaCare’s perpetual adolescence factor is an email that has been making the rounds in Britain. Nick Crews, a British Navy retiree, apparently had a bad Christmas with his three adult children last year. By February of this year, he couldn’t keep it bottled up any more, so he sent them an email saying that they needed to stop whining and flailing about, and needed to begin taking responsibility for their lives. Crews is absolutely right, although I believe that, because his children were raised in a socialist nation that turns the state into a perpetual parent who feeds, clothes, and otherwise provides for the citizen-children, he’s fighting a rearguard action:

Dear All Three

With last evening’s crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.

We are constantly regaled with chapter and verse of the happy, successful lives of the families of our friends and relatives and being asked of news of our own children and grandchildren. I wonder if you realise how we feel — we have nothing to say which reflects any credit on you or us. We don’t ask for your sympathy or understanding — Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children.

Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents.

So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgment to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.

In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn’t for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don’t want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it’s not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won’t do it by simply whingeing and saying you don’t like it. You’ll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn’t possible, or you simply can’t be bothered, then I rest my case.

On Monday, I noted that ObamaCare regulations requiring employers to provide full (really full) insurance coverage to all employees may make running restaurants, which have a famously low profit margin, so prohibitively expensive that many will go out of business.

It turns out that we needn’t fear this eventuality, because we’re about to see a perfect confluence of two Obama policies. Restaurants can avoid the costs of ObamaCare by hiring only part-time employees. This is so because ObamaCare says that employers don’t have to provide health insurance for part-time employees. The down side of this is that the poor, part-time employees will have to provide their own insurance (or pay a penalty), not to mention struggling to pay for food and housing on a part-time salary. Or will they?

As you might have noticed, the economy has not improved measurably under Obama. Indeed, thanks to Obamanomics, college graduates are barely getting by:

In California, it’s long been the joke that prospective actresses come to the state to become waitresses. Now, thanks to the Democrat-created economy, so do college graduates. The newest census shows that between 2006 and 2011, the number of college graduates working as waiters doubled. Approximately 260,000 California college graduates below the age of 30 worked in low-level menial jobs in 2011, an increase of 60,000 over 2006.

And there you have it: the Obama economy provides ready-made part-time employees for a restaurant that can no longer afford full-time employees. Even better, these part-timers will live in their parents’ basements and, until they’re 26, get their insurance from their parents’ employers. Right now, we won’t worry about what happens when their parents’ employers can no longer bear the cost of providing for their own full-time employees, plus an increasing number of Obamanomics-created dependents.

What we’re seeing is the perfect symmetry of an imploding Leftist-managed economy.

There are a couple of things about modern life that are hard to understand. The first is why so many more children have potentially fatal peanut allergies than did in my youth. I have no idea why this is so, and probably never will.

The second thing that’s been mysterious to me is why bullying in school has suddenly become so epidemic. When I was young, there was certainly bullying (and I, being small, near-sighted, and socially awkward, came in for more than my fair share), but bullying really wasn’t a big deal the way it is now. For one thing, I don’t recall a single instance of someone committing suicide in San Francisco due to bullying during my school years, and I was one of those wonkish kids who read the paper daily (explaining, no doubt, why I was targeted for harassment). Lately, though, I’ve come up with a couple of theories about the rise of bullying.

There’s no doubt that social media is responsible in part for bullying. The fact that children can use Facebook and texting to bully from a distance makes the whole process so much easier. It’s one thing to insult a person to her (or his) face. That requires a certain amount of chutzpah. It’s another thing entirely, though, to add your “like” to a derogatory comment on someone’s Facebook page. That’s practically anonymous and gives one an emotionally safe distance from the emotional damage one is causing.

Even social media, though, doesn’t account for the atmosphere in schools that makes relentless bullying socially acceptable. And really, when one considers the omnipresent anti-bullying campaigns that are an integral part of every schools curriculum, it seems odd that bullying is equally omnipresent. Or does it? Could those anti-bullying campaigns be part of the reason bullying is on the rise? I think so.

The schools in my community perfectly exemplify the modern educational approach to bullying. They certainly don’t ignore bullying. To the contrary, they talk about it constantly. They hire touchy-feely gurus to come in and have the kids “open up” about their feelings, apparently in the belief that doing so will increase the average 14-year old’s empathy. They also have peer groups of “specially trained” students who walk around ordering other students not to engage in bullying and who are supposed to mediate school-yard quarrels. I have it on the best authority — the kids’ themselves — that these peer advisers have all the warm, cuddly qualities of a member of Mao’s youth brigade. Just as anti-bully campaigner Dan Savage turns out to be something of a bully himself, those teenagers vested with the power to stop bullying tend to let that power go to their heads. (Not all of them, of course, but enough of them to make other kids sour about the peer advisers.)

Kids who are caught engaging in bullying are counseled, made to do “reparative” work, overseen by faculty members and peer advisers, and otherwise made the objects of a great deal of attention. Unsurprisingly, when these bullies do get caught, they do not have warm and cuddly feelings towards those students who presumably ratted them out.

Oh, and here’s the really important thing to know about how schools deal with bullies: self-defense is not an option. The only recourse for a bullied child is to tell the school authorities.

In theory, this sounds lovely. It does away with vigilante justice and minimizes the fights that used to be fairly common on school playgrounds. That’s the theory.

In fact, making self-defense a crime is a bonanza for the bullies. The alpha child with a mean streak quickly figures out that, if he acts first to create a reign of terror, the other children are powerless to stop him. He’s figured out that it takes two to tangle sufficiently to get the authorities’ attention. As long as he’s dishing out the bullying, but no one is fighting back, the bullying is virtually invisible at the adult level.

Schools will tell you that they also counsel children how about how to avoid becoming victims. This is a semantic gimmick. To the extent the schools “teach” children how to avoid bullying, it doesn’t involve basic physical self-defense (which includes things as simple as walking in a confident way) or verbal self-defense (ways to take control of and deflect a potentially hostile interaction). Instead, it’s all about “feelings.” Well, the only “feeling” the bullied child knows well is fear. Being told to “express” that feeling doesn’t prevent the bullying. Nor does all this “feeling” talk defer the alpha child who’s intent on doing a bit of no good.

The enterprising bully is also unfazed by the fact that the schools have rules against punishing whistle-blowers. After all, the schools also have rules against bullying in the first place, but that’s clearly not stopping anyone.

In the old days, school yards meted out a form of rough justice: fist fights. They weren’t common in my day, but they happened. Two boys would hit the ground in a tangle of fists and feet, all the other children would gather around hollering “Fight!”, and, after a few minutes, a teacher would come along and break it up. That was usually the end of it. Fighting wasn’t encouraged, but it was tolerated up to a certain point, because it constituted community policing. The kids took care of things themselves and, along the way, they learned how to be responsible for their own safety, rather than dependent on others. (Please note that I’m not advocating kids beating each other up, nor am I confusing the rather innocent fist fights in my middle class schools with the brutal knife, gun, etc., gang fights that take place in America’s more dangerous schools.)

There is a perfect analogy for what’s going on in the schools: gun control laws. Those communities that have banned guns, and that have made even home defense a criminal act, blithely expected crime to go down. Instead, of course, it went up. Knowing that potential victims were helpless didn’t make criminals feel a sudden gush of compassion. Instead, it heightened their hunting instincts. Even the most thick-headed amongst them was able to figure out that the home robbery situation, rather than representing a risk, suddenly had all the fun and profit of hunting fish in a barrel.

On the street, the saying is that, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. The same is true in the schoolyard, only it’s worse. When seconds count, the school authorities aren’t there at all and, if a brave child tattles on the bully, either by telling his parents or by telling a school official, the bully suddenly becomes the center of the kind of attention that can only make the victim quite nervous about subsequent repercussions.

The best way to prevent violence is to have a population that can defend itself. While Progressives think that everyone who knows how to fight is a potential bully, I believe that everyone who knows how to fight and who is taught about justice, morals, and decency, is a bulwark against bullying, because he can protect not only himself but also those smaller and weaker than he is.